Where’s my cancer patient action figure?

I know this ridiculous, but what if the Doctor’s companion was a cancer patient. She could run around between chemo treatments and lose her hair. I don’t know. It’s crazy, but maybe it would be nice to see patients with certain illnesses on film out in the world doing things. And by doing things I mean things other than just being a noble patient dying at the end of the movie so everyone else can learn something.

Boy, it’s been so long since I caught up with anyone’s blog — you’ve been busy here!

On-topic: I haven’t seen it, so can’t actually recommend it, just wondering if you’ve seen any of that show with Laura Linney… The Big C? [checking…] Yeah. That’s it. It’s on Showtime, which I think you USED to subscribe to (at least, once Torchwood moved there :)). Probably not the action figure you had in mind!

I’ve been thinking some more about the issue of including a central character (Doctor’s companion, whoever) with a serious, long-term illness. Especially doing it in a way which is mostly incidental to — not the point of — the story, but also in a way which doesn’t shove it under the rug. (“Oh, by the way, I have cancer. Pour me a cup of coffee would you?” “Sure. Cream and sugar?”) A couple of potential problems.

First, if you yourself or someone close to you has never had that illness, no matter how much you research it you might never be comfortable saying this or that is a reasonable thing to happen, to do, or to feel. It’s like, “Who am I to say?”

OTOH, even if you have had or helped someone else through it, there’s the certainty that no one’s experience of something so important is exactly the same. (I was totally surprised, then saddened, then annoyed to find out that some hearing-impaired people loathed my depiction of a hearing-impaired protagonist — loathed it because it “didn’t depict things which are true about the condition” [not a direct quote, but that was the sense of it]. Never mind that they’re true about the author’s condition, mind you.)

It’s really a tough call. When The X-Files was on, during the filming of one season Gillian Anderson was pregnant. It was obvious they were having her do things like holding file folders in front of her, or standing behind someone seated in a chair and so on. But really, y’know, featuring the pregnancy would have been like undermining the show’s central premises. To say nothing of the “what if something happens to the actress’s pregnancy?” stickiness.